Czech news server Protiproud claims that all Romani children are retarded
The year 2015 has begun in the Czech Republic in one of the worst possible ways, with an hysterical, xenophobic campaign against Muslims and Romani people. Czech MP Tomio Okamura unleashed the hateful whirlwind of opinions with his "war on kebabs" and other quasi-fascist opinions have begun swarming like wasps.
It goes without saying that the controversial news server Protiproud ("Against the Current"), which has long been riding similar waves of Fascism and xenophobia here, can no longer stay in the background. Most recently it has published an article reminiscent of a manual for the segregation of ethnic minorities straight from the workshop of Nazi ideologues.
Protiproud getting more and more Fascist
incitement, and the open promotion of racism. Anyone who has stumbled across "Petr Hájek’s counter-revolutionary magazine" called Protiproud, whether out of curiosity or by accident, must have the feeling that they have ended up on the website of some new Fascist organization which is, very awkwardly, hiding behind concepts like "combating political correctness" or "freedom of speech".
The headlines say it all: "Gypsy problem out of control – how long will the state claim these are right-wing extremist actions?", "We face a gypsy war", "Children don’t want to be friends with gypsies", "Crimes by colored people can’t be talked about", "Who is striving to Islamicize the Czech Republic?" Paradoxically, criticism of Ukrainian neo-Nazis takes up a lot of room on this militant news server, while Czech displays of neo-Nazism are evidently supported by its authors and do not bother them in the slightest.
Gypsy explosives
explosives. Is it the end of special schools? Little terrorists storm the classrooms"
The author of this piece, Radek Pokorný, inveighs in a particularly demagogic way against a proposal by Czech Minister for Human Rights, Equal Opportunities and Legislation Jiří Dienstbier, who is doing his best to make it possible for Romani children to exercise their right to attend primary school and thereby end the existing practice according to which young Roma are frequently assigned to special education in the "practical schools" merely because racial prejudice automatically assigns them the role of "problematic pupils" on the basis of their different skin color. Proof of this is recent survey findings showing that Romani children comprise up to 28 % of the pupils in special education.
This discrimination has been repeatedly criticized by the European Union and human rights organizations. In order to reduce the numbers of Romani children attending "practical schools", everyone will be required to attend nursery school for one year prior to enrolling into first grade in order to make up for any handicaps and be ready to attend primary school.
The Roma are retarded
The effort to aid Romani children with escaping social isolation by acquiring a basic education, of course, has run up against that part of the Czech population who are xenophobes. There is no doubt that Pokorný belongs to the more radical segment of this population, and he has been doing his best from the very beginning to defile and discredit the whole project.
His main weapon is to spark panic over the "gypsy bomb" he believes will explode should the proportion of Romani children attending the primary schools increase. Eloquent testimony to the author’s opinions is the fact that he a priori labels Romani children "retarded" in his article.
"As if we didn’t have enough problems with inadaptables," Pokorný writes, warning that Dienstbier’s plan will cause "a societal bloodbath". "Children from the special schools will now storm these mainstream classrooms, children who not only cannot handle mainstream instruction, but who often expressly pose a danger to their fellow pupils. The joke is that most of them are gypsy children from inadaptable families," he writes, mockingly rejecting Dienstbier’s statement that "these children are just as intelligent as majority-population children."
The argumentation that follows about "less intelligent" and "retarded" children, applied generally to all Romani children and inferred solely from their ethnic origin, is dangerously reminiscent of Nazi ideology. Such notions led to the genocide of Jews and Roma during the Second World War.
A risk, a trap, a hell
The article, however, goes even further when it cites an openly antigypsyist statement by the extra-parliamentary, xenophobic, National Democrats (ND) party, which responded to Dienstbier’s proposal as follows: "Every parent knows that all it takes are several inadaptables and a school can become a hell where the minority bullies the majority. Parents who cannot afford to pay for private school have at the very least the right not to be afraid for their children in the public schools. The minister intends to deny them this minimum now."
Pokorný believes that Dienstbier’s plan will artificially stir up a completely new, explosive mixture for these families and their children, "a social nitroglycerin that will require only the slightest shaking to yield another explosion." According to him, most primary schools have functioned up to now on the principle of natural selection, where directors have had "a rather simple tool for getting rid of the problematic (not only, but mostly) gypsy children when they terrorized the other pupils and often the whole school, including teachers: They sent them to special school."
The author has no compunction about creating the impression that the problematic children in the Czech schools are mostly Romani and that their physical presence creates a "risk", a "trap", or even a "hell" for the other, i.e., the docile (understood as non-Romani) pupils. If we were to extend this to its logical conclusion, he is basically claiming that Romani people are an inferior race that is not just less intelligent, but poses a direct danger to those little pupils who are, across the board, decent, docile, intelligent – and ideally blond, blue-eyed and white.
Pokorný concludes that all Romani children, without exception, are "retarded", which means they will never be able to meet the challenges posed by primary school, and this allegedly results in their aggression. This danger is not further described in the context of any specific handicaps or negative behavior of Romani children, but is inferred from their mere presence in any classroom together with their fellow pupils from non-Romani families.
From this logic it is just one small step to the racist perspective that led, at the end of the 1930s, to the creation of concentration camps for Romani people. That perspective led to their genocide.
Blacklist
At the close of his article, in accordance with his Fascist ideology, Pokorný creates a blacklist of "ethnic activists", i.e., everyone who disagrees with his racist opinions and stands up for Romani people. It begins with a "plethora of nonprofit sector corporations sucking on the state budget’s money tube", who "quietly eat up billions from our bloody taxes annually."
Pokorný writes of "whole armies of parasitic activists" in a style that reveals he most probably would prefer to see them behind barbed wire so they wouldn’t stand in the way of his Nazi dream of a pure Czech society. He indiscriminately attacks not only Jiří Dienstbier, whom he calls a "fervently neo-Marxist, multicultural American", but also Czech Labor and Social Affairs Minister Michaela Marksová – Tominová and ombud Anna Šabatová, whom he condemns for "infamously taking such care over Muslim headscarves".
The hateful text seems to have been lifted right from the Fascist magazine Vlajka (The Flag), published during Czechoslovakia’s Second Republic. It ends with the statement that "the progressive families of Havel-style dissidents today have the progress of our backward country firmly in hand today."
Indifference aside
This xenophobic outburst from Protiproud, which is so intensely hateful and and guided by racism, would be condemned to isolation and ridicule in a healthy democratic society where normal coexistence obtains between the members of various cultural, ethnic, and social groups. In the current Czech reality things are, however, unfortunately different.
In today’s nervous, xenophobic atmosphere, people more easily succumb to such demagogic challenges, they more easily succumb to panic and seek simple solutions that often border on Fascism. The fact that such solutions clearly contravene not just good morals but the Constitution should not go ignored.
This is all the more important because police and the criminal justice authorities, with few exceptions, ignore or are indifferent to these proposals, which is hard to understand. The invective of Okamura, Pokorný and many others remains, for the time being, only at the level of verbal attacks on ethnic and social minorities, but that doesn’t mean they cannot become detonators for explosions that could have unforeseen consequences – such as the 2009 arson attack in Vítkov and other racially motivated physical assaults on Romani people.
It is an open secret that the problem of discrimination against Romani people once they are accepted into a primary school is particularly painful not only to the psyches of these schoolchildren, but to their motivation to join the majority society. Unequal access to education is one of the basic problems of inclusion, because lack of education is the main cause of the social exclusion of Romani adults.
This is why attempts to preserve the segregation of Romani people at any cost are particularly reprehensible. They are justified by allegations of Romani aggression, allegations that Romani children pose a danger to "white children", and allegations of Romani inferiority.
